Digital strategy building and social media consultancy in practice – Bluebird Care Wandsworth

With access to digital marketing tools so easily available, the take up among businesses and sectors has been huge. However, we often find that businesses have adopted tools such as social media without a clear digital strategy in place, leading to confusion and ultimately, to wasted resources. Despite this, social media remains a key element to any digital strategy – and it’s worth investing time to get it right, as one of our clients, home care provider Bluebird Care Wandsworth, has done, with our support.

Digital marketing tactics need to be different for every business

Our customerBluebird Care Wandsworth is a franchise business, providing premium home care in South West London. Through a team of highly trained Care Assistants, the business offers a variety of services to its customers, all designed to support them as they remain living in their own homes despite the challenges they may face from ill health or aging. Their services allow people to stay in an environment they feel comfortable in, surrounded by the people they love, rather than move into a care home. The business needs to connect with a number of different communities and stakeholders – customers, their families, community organisations, health and other service providers – and rightly sees social media as an excellent means of doing so.

Our brief
BBCW had been using a number of routes to promote themselves through digital platforms and felt they needed to get more expert direction and more in depth understanding of processes so they could gain more from this route to market.

WebAdeptUK were called in during summer 2016 to help them refocus, and to establish how the organisation could optimise their use social media within the wider digital marketing context. Part of the remit was to help create social media champions within the business so all tasks could eventually be moved inhouse. During the initial phase, we were tasked with taking over social media broadcasting and content creation to create a space for the inhouse team to deepen their understanding of digital marketing and social media practice.

How did we create a great digital strategy?

Audit
We undertook an in depth audit of the business’s digital assets including website and social media platforms. We also spent time discussing social media and digital marketing with the newly appointed social media manager. All these activities gave us an insight into where the business needed to focus initially, and then longer term – both key for developing a digital strategy. The audit also informed the strategy that we went on to define to achieve a clear goal for BBCW’s digital marketing activities.

Digital strategy development & training
We established the value of BBCW using social media to connect with various stakeholders. With this as a starting point, we worked with BBCW to develop a 12-month plan, split into quarters, with a defined end result: for Web Adept to pass the social media back to the company over this time while training a member of staff to be a ‘Social Media Champion’.

Q1 – Consolidation We stabilised the social media platforms, centralised and ‘locked down’ a single, branded handle across all platforms. We helped the business create central password management – a vital element to any social media strategy. We worked with the newly appointed in house social media manager to develop her understanding of the opportunities social media offered, and introduced her to automation tools, in particular Hootsuite.

We edited the website, and introduced a coaching & mentoring relationship to develop a more focused approach to content marketing and social media broadcasting. During this period, we took responsibility for broadcasting through social media and creating content, with input from the in house team. We set up some automation of social media and began benchmarking against other businesses in the area, competitors and franchise leaders.

We also set up a review process with agreed KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which would measure performance as we developed a strategy and helped them implement it.

Q2 – Training and development – and curved balls! With our team continuing to take responsibility for content marketing and social media, we delivered 2 training sessions on site, and held a number of mentoring calls with BBCW’s in house social media manager. As she began to feel more confident and understand the interaction between content and social, we began handing over these aspects, and offered support and coaching to encourage better time management.

While we were working with the business, they purchased the Bluebird Care franchise in the neighbouring borough, so we added in some additional consultancy to support decisions relating to the social media direction they should take.

Q3 – Mentoring With the newly trained ‘social media champion’ feeling confident and comfortable, we worked in tandem with her as she took over content and social media broadcasting, maintaining a close ‘mentoring’ role. We reviewed social posts and blogs, and provided mentoring and a review at the end of the process to make sure everything was going well and moving in the right direction.

Q4 – Hand over Our residual responsibility for content marketing and social media broadcasting ended with total hand over to BBCW’s social media champion. We set up an ongoing Service Level Agreement to allow them to call on use for support, reporting, relearning mentoring into the future. This will allow BBCW be at the top of their social media game working closely with a professional Digital Marketing Agency and to stay up to date with the ever-changing and fast-moving world of Social Media Platforms, new and emerging. WebAdeptUK will carry out periodic audits of the performance and explore emerging platforms, and different methods to optimise the use of social media to benefit the business in a broad range of areas including recruitment, staff retention, communication, brand and service awareness.

Outcome
12 months on, the in house social media manager and team are creating content and managing the social media platforms, successfully and confidently.

An example of the success we have achieved together is the increase in website traffic from Social Media Platforms which has increased from 3% to 15%.

The key achievements have been

• Stabilisation of all social media platforms to one handle and review of all settings
• Benchmarking of performance against competitors in and external to the franchise companies
• Consolidation and invigoration of social media broadcasting, including defining key audiences and ‘tone of voice’
• Successful support, mentoring, and consultancy relationship, which will continue.
• Establishment of a user-friendly reporting system to measure results and review KPI’s
• Streamlined social media and content marketing approach across the organisation
• Support and training to in house social media manager to develop her skills and confidence to the point where she is now comfortably managing social media and content marketing
• A knowledgeable and motivated in house social media team that can manage a multiple number of social media platforms with an engaging ‘knowledge leader’ content management offering.

Every business is different. It’s been a pleasure working with Blue Bird Care Wandsworth and see their digital marketing activity develop. A similar approach can work for any business, and we can help you audit your current digital assets and define a forward-looking digital strategy, whilst offering ongoing support as you develop an in house capability. Equally, we can offer a complete, bespoke package to manage your digital marketing on your behalf, or develop a tailored package of support and ongoing management to suit you.